Well, this stadium business is nothing new. Going back at least to Walter O’Malley in the 1950s, and his efforts to get a stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers, team owners either threaten to, or actually do, move the team to another city if they don’t get their way.
I’ve also heard many discussions over the years, among fans, about how a city “needs” professional sports, to be a truly “world class” city. Generally they mean that a city should have teams in major league baseball, NFL football, NBA basketball, and NHL hockey, to be truly a “major” city.
I know some cities have had the voters vote on bond issues and financing deals for stadiums. Politicians who give away the store should be criticized, but in some places, voters themselves wanted to fund these stadium deals.
“...team owners either threaten to, or actually do, move the team to another city if they don’t get their way.”
That’s the absolute truth.
In the last 12 years, the taxpayers have forked out huge amounts of money to multi-millionaires who built a new baseball stadium for the Minnesota Twins baseball team and Minnesota Vikings football team.
Both the Twins and Vikings owners said the same thing. - “we’re gonna pack up and go elsewhere unless you give us what we want”.
In Minnesota, there’s a state law in which the taxpayers, who reside where the new stadium is being built, get to hold a referendum on whether they want to be taxed for a new stadium.
In both above examples, the legislature stripped the referendum requirement from the bill because the owners said it was a non-starter if the referendum requirement stayed in the bill.
The sad part of this? There were a lot of Republicans who supported removing the referendum requirement and then voted for passage of the new stadium bills.
After the Vikings stadium bill passed, a number of us got together and went to some of the districts where these legislators were in primaries. we managed to get three of them defeated in the GOP primary - but the damage was done.
I could go on and on about the other crazy things that happened during the passage of these bills - but that’s a whole ‘nother story.